Stretched Metaphors
by CharmedMummy
Summary: Who knew Jenga could say so much about one's romantic relationship?  Danny and Lindsay explore that in this oneshot which is part of my Let's Play a Game series, though you don't have to read any of the others to enjoy this one.


**AN:** Here is yet another fic that revolves around a game, which this time is the all-too-addictive Jenga. You all can thank my beta **Kerry Blue** for this getting done. I had a vague idea of the story and I made the mistake of mentioning it to her and so then she wasn't about to let me forget it. :)

Anyway, the story is pretty much all D/L. Other characters are mentioned, but Danny and Lindsay are really the only ones featured. It's set some indeterminate time after the season three finale and includes various references to things that have occurred throughout the series. I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks as always to my lovely betas, **Kerry Blue** and **printandpolish**. They are wonderful as always for taking time out of their busy schedules to help little old me with my stories. Any remaining mistakes are totally and completely my fault.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own any of the plots, characters, etc. from _CSI:NY_, I am merely letting my imagination run wild with the wonderful concepts the show has given us all. I also do not own the game of Jenga, that privilege belongs to Hasbro.

* * *

"I'm glad we decided to go," Lindsay said as she and Danny left the building and walked down the sidewalk, her left hand in his right. She moved closer to his side, wrapping her right hand around his bicep and putting her head on his shoulder. Normally neither of them were for this much PDA, but the night seemed to call for it. They had just left a party put on for Sid and his wife's anniversary by their family and it was obvious to anyone at the gathering who looked at the Hammerbacks that they were very much in love even after having been married for so long. It was the kind of thing that even got someone as practical as Lindsay daydreaming about what she and Danny might be like that far into the future. 

"Yeah, me too," Danny replied. "If just for the experience of seeing Sid with his family. Who woulda thought the family of Sid Hammerback would be so _normal_?"

Lindsay briefly took her right hand off his arm to smack him on the chest. "Danny!"

"What? You know you were thinking it, too."

She just rolled her eyes and let it drop. Besides, she couldn't completely deny it. The thought _had_ crossed her mind at least once. After a couple minutes of companionable silence, she changed the subject. "Who would have thought Don would be that good at Jenga?"

"You're tellin' me," Danny snorted. "I would have thought that the doctors or the scientists like us who have to deal with minute pieces of evidence would have had better hand-eye coordination than him."

"Well, maybe his interrogation skills have something to do with it. I swear he intimidated a couple of people into losing just by staring at them." There had been a ton of people revolving through the party since it was an all-day affair to make it possible for most of the people from the morgue, lab and precincts to make at least an appearance before or after their shifts. At some point, a kind of around-the-world style game of Jenga had started where six people played and whoever lost a round had to get up and let someone else sit down. Once Flack had shown up to the party and joined the game he had never left his seat, the only one to do so all day. Most had tried to rattle other players with chants of "Jenga! Jenga!" as they pried bricks out of the tower, but Flack never did. His snark and skills as a detective apparently intimidated fellow Jenga players just as well as they did the suspects he interrogated on a daily basis.

"And being a cop who has had to pull his weapon on occasion, it makes sense that he has good control over his hands," Danny reasoned.

"Hmmm," Lindsay murmured in agreement. They walked on through the warm night, content to walk in the general direction of Lindsay's apartment, which was closer than his. Her mind shifted again to thinking about Sid and his wife. She and Danny had talked to the couple only briefly since, as the guests of honor, they were in high demand. But from a comment here and there, Lindsay had gleaned that while Sid and his wife had always been in love, they had been treasuring their relationship even more ever since Sid had had his near fatal allergic reaction in the morgue and Stella saved his life.

Lindsay didn't doubt the power of those kinds of moments that brought perspective to everything and made you reevaluate what you were doing with your life. Something clicked in her mind and she spoke without fully thinking it out. "What was your Jenga moment with me?" She took her head off his shoulder and met his amused and confused gaze.

"You're gonna have to explain that a little, Montana. Somehow I don't think you're talkin' about the game anymore."

She licked her lips and looked down at where her hand rested on his arm. She wasn't usually the kind of girl who sprung these types of questions on guys to make them squirm. But she wasn't trying to make Danny uncomfortable, she was merely curious. "I was just thinking about Sid and his wife, and somehow that got jumbled up with Jenga in my head and I started wondering what moment it was for you where, you know, you fell for me. Which thing was the block that when pulled, the whole tower fell?" When she got no response, she looked up to find him gazing forward at the sidewalk in front of them without seeming to really see it. She almost took back the question, but then he finally answered.

"I think it had to be the Holly case," he finally admitted.

Lindsay squeezed his hand in hers. "Yeah, I remember that as a distinct turning point in our relationship. Hearing your voice through the smoke…" She almost shivered at the memory of her one foray into undercover work. It wasn't exactly something she enjoyed reliving.

"Well, yeah, there was the way my heart stopped when I realized your cover was blown and my immense relief at finding you unhurt," Danny replied. "But that wasn't what I was referring to specifically." He took a deep breath. "My 'Jenga moment,' as you put it, was more the moment you offered to go in and when I tried to persuade you not to do it." His thumb stroked absent-mindedly on her hand. "I've never really had a problem with women on the job. Most I've worked with have been strong and capable and just as good as any man I've ever known. And while I might have doubted you on your first day, you soon proved to me that you fit very well into that group along with women like Maka, Aiden and Stella."

They continued walking through a few moments of silence, Lindsay letting the quiet go as long as Danny needed. Finally, he reached his left hand up to rub the back of his neck before continuing. "I didn't doubt that you could go undercover and do the job as well as anyone else. And yet I still had to try and talk you out of it. Then when you walked away from me, with your Kevlar vest on, all ready for action, I had to admit to myself why I didn't want you to do it. It wasn't because I didn't think you could handle it or because I didn't think a CSI should do something so far out of their job description, but because I cared about you. A lot. So much so that I was willing to tick you off by seemingly insulting your ability to make your own decisions and do your job if it meant keeping you safe." He shook his head ruefully. "Though now that I think about it, that was more my pre-Jenga moment."

Lindsay laughed through the tears that had she had been trying to hold back at his words. "'Pre-Jenga moment'?"

"Hey, if you can make up phrases, so can I!" Danny insisted. "The Holly case was the brick that, when pulled, made the tower unstable and inevitable that it was going to crash in the not-too-distant future. But I have to say that the final brick that sent me tumblin' was your absence while you were testifyin' in Montana. It was like one of those bricks that you start pullin' and it's a little stubborn, but you think you'll be fine. But then, when you've almost got it and you're thinking you'll make it another round, one little nudge sends the whole tower over. That was me while you were in Montana. I thought I would be fine, kept fooling myself into thinkin' that I could get through you being gone even though from the way you had been acting for a long time, I knew that you were probably going through some kind of hell out there. And then…and then I started hallucinating. No, seriously," he insisted at seeing her incredulous look. "I was pushing myself, working crazy hours, not because I was especially needed at the lab, but because I couldn't stand going home and thinking about you all night. So, I was on little sleep, worrying about you, and it got to the point where I would look up and see you walking towards me in the lab. You'd be smiling at me like I hadn't really seen you smile since before the Holly case, and I would smile in return thinking how glad I was that you were back in more ways than one, and then I would blink and you would be gone and I would find that I had been grinning like a fool at some poor lab tech who probably thought I had gone insane. And I think I _would_ have gone nutso if I hadn't hopped that flight to Montana. I flew there for myself as much as I did it for you. I just couldn't stand stepping back any longer and letting you go through your hell alone. I know what it's like to go through shit like that by yourself and I just couldn't let you do it without me anymore."

He finally really looked over at her and she smiled through her tears which she had given up on fighting to hold back. Danny could be as romantic as the next guy when he wanted to be, but he wasn't the type to get this…emotional. Oh, sure, he was an emotional guy when he was angry and upset or anxious or something like that, but emotional in terms of his romantic feelings? And then articulating those emotions out loud? It was a fairly unusual occurrence, but that just made this moment that much more special for Lindsay.

Stopping their progress on the sidewalk, Lindsay briefly brought his head down to hers for a kiss. They smiled at each other, foreheads momentarily resting against one another, before resuming their stroll. Danny was the one to break the silence this time. "And what about you, Miss Monroe? There's no way you're making me reply to a question like that without answering it yourself."

She didn't have to think about it long. "Mine was definitely when I stood you up." She smiled as he looked over at her with a question in his eyes. "If you didn't mean anything to me, Danny, I would have had no problem going on that date with you and probably more. But when I stood you up I realized that you had come to mean too much to me to just casually date you as if you were like every other guy that I had ever dated. The ones that I had never let get past the surface Lindsay. I was pretty sure that you had already seen past a lot of my defenses and that scared the crap out of me. I couldn't let you get any deeper than you already were without falling completely apart at a time when I felt that I owed it to my childhood friends to keep myself together. So, I pushed you away." She smiled up at him. "That was my Jenga moment, though at the time my head was so messed up that I didn't recognize it. It took months, until you walked into that courtroom in Montana, for me to realize that my tower of bricks labeled 'Danny' had long since fallen and the pieces were strewn across the table. And while events like you getting held hostage in that warehouse might scare the hell out of me, that's one tower that will never be rebuilt. I've fallen for you and there's no going back."

Danny stopped their progress and turned to face her. He brushed some tears off of her cheeks, then pulled her into a sweet kiss. When they broke apart, Lindsay laid her head against his shoulder and he wrapped his arms around her. After a few moments of just enjoying each other, Lindsay spoke. "When did we get so sappy?"

Danny laughed out loud before leaning down to kiss her thoroughly. "You were the one who started it, Montana."

She shrugged, running her hand across the stubble on his jaw. "Maybe, but you were the one who started stretching my metaphor, Cowboy."

"I could stretch it even more by listing every brick that came out, starting first I think with the time you whipped out your Swiss Army knife to cut a chunk of evidence off of a hanging slab of meat." He inclined his head to bring his mouth next to her ear. "But there's something else I'd really like to stretch right now," he murmured.

Lindsay didn't have time to roll her eyes at his innuendo before he was kissing her again. It didn't take much of that before she was just as eager as he was to catch a cab or a subway car to get back to her apartment as fast as possible. _Jenga!_


End file.
